Some figures in metal, particularly the old dudes from the early days, take on a certain legendary status. The stories you’ve heard about the greats can’t all be true. Some of them are just too ridiculous to be real. For example, metal icon Lemmy Kilmister used to regularly tell the story that a doctor once looked at a blood sample from him and determined that there were so many drugs in Lemmy’s system that giving him clean, whole blood would kill him. Lemmy’s manager denied the story was true and, honestly, it sounds like bullshit. But that’s how metal legends are born.
There are similarly wild stories about Ozzy Osbourne and, some of them we know to be true. Everyone knows about the famous incident where he bit the head off a bat, though Osbourne has explained many times that he thought it was plastic and didn’t realize it wasn’t until he actually bit into it. Tasty.
In the 2019 Mötley Crüe biopic, The Dirt, there’s a scene in which, in 1984, a young Ozzy Osbourne (Tony Cavalero) challenges Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx (Douglas Booth) to a sort of gross-out contest at a hotel swimming pool and Ozzy ends up snorting a line of ants, peeing on the ground and licking up his own pee, and then challenging Sixx to do the same and licking up his pee before Sixx can do it. I had to stop and vomit about four times from writing that last sentence.
In a recent appearance on the podcast This Past Weekend with Theo Von (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), Mötley Crüe drummer and failed rapper Tommy Lee was asked if the story was true, and Lee insisted there was no word of a lie to it:
“Full-on true. I know people ask that all the time. They’re, like, ‘Dude, really?’ I’m, like, abso-fucking-lutely. You can’t make that shit up.”
I mean, I could easily make up shit like that. That’s not hard. The hard part is not grossing yourself out in the process of thinking about it. But Lee continued:
“Dude, he was so high. All of us [were]. We had just been on an overnight bus ride, and Ozzy rode with us. So we’re doing rails the whole way. No one slept; everyone [was] just drink[ing]. So we’re at the hotel, and no one wanted to go to their room. Everyone wanted to still keep partying. So we go, ‘Let’s go to the fucking pool.’ We go to the pool.
“At that time, it was just kind of a thing — everybody was into [trying to] out-rock star and out-gross somebody out, like out-partying. So Ozzy’s wasted. He sees there’s a little trail of ants going all the way to this kid’s popsicle that he left on the ground. And Ozzy looks down and fucking just snorts the line of ants going to the popsicle. And Nikki’s, like, ‘Okay. Well, fuck that.’ So Nikki pulls his dick out at the pool. This is a hotel. This was, like, the Four Seasons [hotel], I think, in Dallas. And [there were] people, kids, everything. Nikki goes, ‘Fuck that. Watch this.’ Nikki goes to pee on the ground and Nikki’s gonna lick up his own piss to outdo Ozzy. And before Nikki could do it, Ozzy fucking beats him to it and licks up his piss. And we’re, like, ‘All right, Ozzy. You win. You win, dude.’”
Yeah, Ozzy can have that win if he wants. Nobody needs to outdo that shit. If anyone does manage to do something even grosser than that while partying, I certainly don’t want to read or write about it. I’ll let Hesher write that story if it comes up, thanks.